Few people know this but NASA actually has a warp drive program underway at Johnson Space Center. A recent article on the program created some open-ended questions that needed to be answered. The article seemed to imply that Harold White (who heads the project) had signed non-disclosure agreements such that he could not discuss public-funded research. That's a little unusual for NASA. So I sent a series of questions to Harold White and NASA PAO.

NASA periodically funds "out there" research. This really isn't anything new or spectacular. A lot of it is politics and thinking of ways of spending stimulus funds that were earmarked for basic research.

We really don't even know what we don't know about interstellar travel. Yet. Even if we had a viable FTL propulsion system dropped into our laps, there are a legion of other problems that would have to be solved before we headed for the stars.

So its neat and interesting, but don't hold your breath for a break through.

Few people know this but NASA actually has a warp drive program underway at Johnson Space Center. A recent article on the program created some open-ended questions that needed to be answered. The article seemed to imply that Harold White (who heads the project) had signed non-disclosure agreements such that he could not discuss public-funded research. That's a little unusual for NASA. So I sent a series of questions to Harold White and NASA PAO.

Supposedly we can't produce a warp drive because it requires sending negative energy faster than light. But what if we keep the warp drive sublight? Even a sublight warp drive lets us travel at very close to the speed of light, without having to kill ourselves with the acceleration to get there quickly or worry about hitting a speck of dust... even if we can't go FTL, it lets us reach Mars in less than an hour and get to Saturn within a day, and whilst we wouldn't have time dilation shortening the (onboard) ~5 years it would take to reach Alpha Centauri, we could at least get there in that amount of time...

Though I must wonder what happens when you drop lower into a potential well whilst surrounded by your warp bubble. All that potential energy has to go somewhere, and if it doesn't go into speeding up your craft, might it go into heating up your craft...?

I get the idea behind the quantum plasma thruster, I think. We know black holes can create mass from the quantum vacuum (by using it's own mass-energy), so might a sufficiently powerful electric field be able to do the same (say, by drawing the positrons that are randomly created to one side and giving them energy, allowing their entangled electron counterparts to come into existence - basically creating antimatter and matter from the vacuum)? Once you've got those, treat it as a normal antimatter rocket. Of course, you need to get that energy from somewhere, so it probably wouldn't make much sense, unless you can create a beam of neutrinos to get thrust from, since you don't have to worry about them hitting anything...

Or you could thrust of WIMPs, if they exist and you can actually find a way to interact with them...

I get the idea behind the quantum plasma thruster, I think. We know black holes can create mass from the quantum vacuum (by using it's own mass-energy), so might a sufficiently powerful electric field be able to do the same (say, by drawing the positrons that are randomly created to one side and giving them energy, allowing their entangled electron counterparts to come into existence - basically creating antimatter and matter from the vacuum)? Once you've got those, treat it as a normal antimatter rocket. Of course, you need to get that energy from somewhere, so it probably wouldn't make much sense, unless you can create a beam of neutrinos to get thrust from, since you don't have to worry about them hitting anything...

IIRC In a a hard Vacuum due to quantum fluctuations (tho its possible everywhere and its just harder to spot them amongst normal matter) what are called virtual particles as they normally appear and disappear(annihilate each other) very quickly in pairs. Stephen Hawking suggested that near a black hole sometimes the black hole annihilates one of the virtual particles with negative energy and allows the other virtual particle to become real and take mass away from the black hole but this is so only for small mass black holes as according to wiki(having just checked some of the above) any black hole with a mass more than our moon would absorb more than it would lose from the CMB radiation because of course E=MC2. So black holes are not creating mass or energy they are just redistributing it that is of course if Hawking is right which is yet to be proven but could be if CERN gets to high enough energies.

The thing that worries me about black holes is that as we have observed them existing they either prove the Big Bang did not happen and we are in some kind of steady state continuous creation Universe that just looks a bit like a Big Bang happened or what we think of now as fundamental constants are not and have changed over time as if all the matter/energy(E=MC2 remember) that now exists in the Universe were in a small area like that of the Big Bang it would be a very massive black hole with a very slow evaporation due to Hawking radiation not a fast inflating Universe.

_________________Someone has to tilt at windmills.So that we know what to do when the real giants come!!!!

Supposedly we can't produce a warp drive because it requires sending negative energy faster than light. But what if we keep the warp drive sublight? Even a sublight warp drive lets us travel at very close to the speed of light, without having to kill ourselves with the acceleration to get there quickly or worry about hitting a speck of dust...

Though I must wonder what happens when you drop lower into a potential well whilst surrounded by your warp bubble. All that potential energy has to go somewhere, and if it doesn't go into speeding up your craft, might it go into heating up your craft...?

I'm afraid you don't have a clear idea of the concept of a "warp drive". The ship never goes FTL. In fact it barely moves at all in a relativistic sense. What the drive does is distorts space around it, compressing space in front of it and expanding it behind. The "warp" of the warp drive. As a way of visualizing it, pass a magnifying lens over a surface that represents space-time. The distorted image is what the warp drive does/has to do. How this actually works (or if it works at all) is all conjecture. Is there a traveling distortion that pulls the ship along (ala Star Trek), or does it "worm hole" thru space that has one long distortion field all the way from origin to destination point?

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I get the idea behind the quantum plasma thruster, Or you could thrust of WIMPs, if they exist and you can actually find a way to interact with them...

Quantum physics is even less likely a FTL propulsion solution than "warp drive", unless you want to arrive at your destination one particle at a time...

Supposedly we can't produce a warp drive because it requires sending negative energy faster than light. But what if we keep the warp drive sublight? Even a sublight warp drive lets us travel at very close to the speed of light, without having to kill ourselves with the acceleration to get there quickly or worry about hitting a speck of dust...

Though I must wonder what happens when you drop lower into a potential well whilst surrounded by your warp bubble. All that potential energy has to go somewhere, and if it doesn't go into speeding up your craft, might it go into heating up your craft...?

I'm afraid you don't have a clear idea of the concept of a "warp drive". The ship never goes FTL. In fact it barely moves at all in a relativistic sense. What the drive does is distorts space around it, compressing space in front of it and expanding it behind. The "warp" of the warp drive. As a way of visualizing it, pass a magnifying lens over a surface that represents space-time. The distorted image is what the warp drive does/has to do. How this actually works (or if it works at all) is all conjecture. Is there a traveling distortion that pulls the ship along (ala Star Trek), or does it "worm hole" thru space that has one long distortion field all the way from origin to destination point?

Another challenge is that in order to create a warp bubble that moves faster than light, scientists would need to distribute negative energy around a craft, including ahead of it. White doesn’t think this is a problem; when I ask him about it, he says rather vaguely that a warp drive would work because of an “apparatus you have that’s creating the conditions that you need.” But creating those conditions in front of a ship would mean generating a distribution of negative energy that travels faster than light, a violation of the theory of general relativity.

Well, but there are some people in Norway who would probably be happy to give some money to whomever manages to unify them .

I've tried to read the PDF, but don't know enough (anything, actually ) general relativity to understand it. It reads like he knows what he's talking about though. If the experiment actually works, at least we'll have some evidence that the concept isn't fatally flawed. Still far-out blue sky stuff, but it's cool that NASA is spending a small bit of its budget on these kinds of things, as long as it's serious physics (which this does seem to be) rather than crackpot theories...

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus

White says he’s found a way around that limitation. In a computer simulation, White varied the strength and geometry of a warp field. He determined that, in theory, he could produce a warp bubble using millions of times less negative energy than Alcubierre predicted and perhaps little enough that a space craft could carry the means of producing it. “The findings,” he says, “change it from impractical to plausible.”

The device looks like a large red velvet doughnut with wires tightly wound around a core, and it's one of two initiatives Eagleworks is pursuing, along with warp drive. It's also secret. When I ask about it, White tells me he can't disclose anything other than that the technology is further along than warp drive ... Yet when I ask how it would create the negative energy necessary to warp space-time he becomes evasive.

What is it! didnt the Nazis spin wires around things to make them hover or such like?